- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 takes the franchise further than ever before with groundbreaking new elements like worldwide Aviation Careers, a white-knuckle Challenge League system, and a brand-new World Photographer mode.
- The representation of Earth, the “digital twin,” graphically takes a leap forward with a jaw-dropping enhancement of the ground detail, the inclusion of worldwide ship traffic, the first ever implementation of helipads, glider airports, oil rigs, and vertical obstructions around the world all the way to the addition of dozens of animal species worldwide.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – available for pre-order today on Steam – will launch in a variety of editions on November 19, 2024, and the Standard Edition will be available on day one with PC Game Pass. All pre-orders will receive the De Havilland Canada CL-415 firefighting aircraft to use instantly in Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020).
Click here to pre-order on Steam!
2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator was by far the most successful entry in Microsoft’s longest supported franchise. It redefined what was possible from a flight simulator by utilizing a mix of cloud-based worldwide map data, cutting-edge photogrammetry, machine learning techniques, and a real-time worldwide weather simulation. These offerings, along with a complex physics system that allowed for highly sophisticated flight models, all made the famous franchise a household name again.
Now with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on fast approach for a November 19, 2024, release date, we got our first deep dive into the game, and discovered how much more impressive the entire flight simulator experience is about to become for fans. From the digital tourist to a novice flyer to the most advanced pilots, it’s shaping up to have something for everyone to enjoy.
“Since we launched Microsoft Flight Simulator in 2020, we have seen 15 million people come to the simulation and be interested in what we do,” explains Head of Microsoft Flight Simulator Jorg Neumann. “When you compare that number to the previous biggest launch we had, which was Microsoft Flight Simulator X, it took 16 years to get to 5 million users. So there has been an explosion in the flight simulation hobby and it’s because of the community and excitement that everybody’s bringing [to Microsoft Flight Simulator].”
Earning Your Wings
One of the features I’m most excited to see come to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (MSFS 2024) is its Career System, designed to bring a comprehensive and immersive experience for all manner of piloting skills. The system cleverly mimics the experience of how real-world pilots start their aviation careers. “You can pick any single airport on the planet and start your career there, which means that you are going to take your lessons at this location. Your first job can be anywhere, and I mean anywhere, in the world,” explains CCO of Asobo Studio David Dedeine. “You will start as a rookie pilot and meet a mentor who will explain to you how the career works and guide you through the very first steps in the career.”
The Career System introduces new elements to the simulation like pre-flight procedures, logging flight paths, and choosing from a vast amount of mission objectives. Advancement is tracked through a certification tree where you can learn the skills to fly various types of aircraft – each of which comes with a training session to help you master those skills. Later, specializations will unlock a variety of missions, such as Search and Rescue, Commercial Flights, Firefighting, and many more.
“You are not going to have to spend five years of your life to do the actual exam. It’s a simplified version, but still, it will explain to you the basics of each of those different activities, from commercial pilot to tailwind, airliner, transport, etc.” Dedeine adds. “Performance for these missions is evaluated by several factors like following ATC instructions, taxi paths, and flight parameters. Completing these missions successfully nets you credits and reputation, which you can then use to save up and buy your own plane and eventually manage your own fleet.”
Once you have earned enough money to run your business with your personally-owned aircraft, a new phase in MSFS 2024 opens in which you’ll be directly responsible for your aircraft; every landing, every bump on the runway, is going to impact the warranty of your planes, affecting the cost to keep them maintained. Effectively, MSFS 2024 includes a management sim inside the wider flight sim.
“This is basically the management of your fleet,” Dedeine elaborates, “because you will buy more planes at some point to allow you to engage in a different type of activity. Maybe you want to buy your own airliners and expand your fleet across the world. This new Career System is a big chunk of the innovation we introduce in MSFS 2024, and I think it’s never been done at this level of variety and quality before.”
If there was a ding against the 2020 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, it was that each of its individual experiences, like Bush Trips and Landing Challenges (which are still fun), rarely felt connected to each other. It was akin to putting on a greatest hits album, giving you the best bits without experiencing what the journey was like to get there. This is what I’ve wanted from a flight simulator for such a long time, and having a chance to create my own virtual pilot journey from start to finish sounds like it’s going to keep me flying for a long, long time.
Improving the “Digital Twin”
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is also bringing massive enhancements to the simulated Earth by increasing the detail of its virtual environment by a factor of 4,000. For instance, the ground will no longer be a mere heightfield; it now features tiny stones, rocks, gravel and grass all modeled in 3D. This ground detail impacts your aircraft’s wheels as they interact with the various surfaces affecting take-offs and landings. Improved sky and atmospheric lighting, especially during sunrise and sunset, with varying displays of colors based on the makeup of the clouds ensuring accurate temperatures for all light sources. New cloud types like cirrus clouds will better simulate the highest levels of our atmosphere, while the dynamic weather has been improved as well, increasing the density to make storms and other weather phenomena much more realistic and impressive to fly through.
“We can basically get every rock on Earth now; it’s unbelievable,” Neumann adds. “We updated the aerial imagery for the entire world, and we set up a team of specialists that gather digital elevation maps from across the planet. The result of these last four years of work is that we now have an unprecedented level of ground detail. Nobody else has anything like this.”
And it’s not just inanimate objects that are getting massive improvements. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is attempting to populate its digital Earth (the “digital twin”) as close to our real world as feasible by introducing a large cast of diverse human characters and locally-significant vehicles, all adding to the overall realism of the simulation. For instance, there’s real-time ship tracking so you can see cargo ships move throughout the world as you would in real life. You can see passengers inside airliners or moving from one location to the next in airports. And because landing just about anywhere in the world is one of the key features, due to the much more detailed environments, the development team worked closely with partners like Frontier (creators of Zoo Tycoon and Planet Zoo) to introduce many species that bring the world to life.
“We have species separated into two groups. For wild animals, we are using a fantastic database (GBIF – the Global Biodiversity Information Facility) to place animals across the world both in their appropriate habitats and in roughly appropriate quantities to get close to realistic densities. For domesticated animals, we are using our field detection (which is also used for activities like Aerial Application) to place species like cows, sheep, goats and horses across the planet. We can essentially now go sheep herding or cow herding with helicopters, which is super fun,” Neumann explains.
Powered By the Cloud
Another big area of improvement that’s planned is addressing the installation size. It’s no big surprise how much space Microsoft Flight Simulator takes up on your console or PC (it’s a lot). So, it’s refreshing to hear how this is one of the biggest things that is being addressed in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. By tapping into the latest cloud streaming technology, installation size has been trimmed down to about 30 GB to get you in your seat and flying as quickly as possible, streaming in the higher detailed areas that are only necessary for your flight path; why install all the data for the United States when you’re intending to just fly over Europe for the evening?
“The very important thing is overall bandwidth consumption is way down, because you only download what you really see when you see it, and we don’t pre-download at like hundreds of gigabytes,” explains CEO and Co-Founder of Asobo Studio Sebastian Wloch. ”Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) already had over two petabytes of data on the cloud. That was the whole world data. We kept adding to that, but we still had planes, airports, meshes, points of interests like castles, and textures that were all installed. That’s the part that kept growing with the marketplace content, which had grown to 2 TB. Now we integrated everything into the cloud, and it is all streamed and kept into a rolling cache on the hardware. You don’t have to install any new World Updates; they’re just streamed seamlessly.”
It’s all highly optimized and tailored to each player’s experience. For example, if you fly over a large international airport, you won’t need to have the highest quality version of the mesh downloaded on your system. The simulator is only going to pull the lowest or medium quality version, leaving the higher quality assets streamed on demand through the cloud for when you’re closer.
Another impressive addition to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 will be its “soft body simulation” for hot air balloons. These balloons will be simulated across 6,400 surfaces giving a realistic reaction to heat density — when you turn on the heater, the air will heat up, and it’s going to inflate the massive balloon.
“You will see the balloon inflated and get lighter. Combustion happens, and the balloon goes up. Banners are physically simulated, so they will flap in the wind, just exactly like tissue with the rope attached,” explains Wloch. “Also, we now have parachutes. For example, the Cirrus Vision Jet, which you can fly, has a parachute system that can be deployed when needed.”
Attention to Detail
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is launching with one of the most largely diverse groups of highly detailed aircraft systems than any flight simulator has ever come with before. It isn’t just how good these aircraft look – and they certainly look fantastic – but also the care and attention that has been given to these systems.
“The reason that we wanted to focus on this experience so much and to build things like flight planning and pre-flight activities into the simulator is because we wanted to make sure everyone had the opportunity to take advantage of those kind of capabilities and those kinds of experiences,” explains Co-Founder of Working Title Simulations Christopher Burnett. “One of the things that has impacted simmers in the past is that flight simulators have often used outside tools to do their flight planning or preflight activities, and those came with some barriers to entry, things like cost or maybe complexity, that kept a lot of them from doing that.”
Now you’ll be able to go through the entire preflight experience, from planning to briefing for things like weather, and then executing that flight on some of the most detailed cockpits and avionics systems that we’ve ever seen in a flight simulator. The new flight planning tool supports anything from small flight plans all the way up to larger, more complicated paths using the same kind of tools that airline dispatchers use for their long commercial flights.
“We’ve also got several commercial aircraft systems that we’re bringing into MSFS 2024,” Burnett explains. “The 737 Max 8 avionics package is one of those. Of course, we’ve got the 787 and 747 8i as well. Then something exciting that we’re working on is the Boeing 747 400 LCF, also known as the Dreamlifter. This is a purpose-built aircraft that Boeing made to help them with the manufacture of the 787. They expanded it and now simmers can use this to fly aircraft parts around. We’ve partnered with Boeing to faithfully recreate this aircraft and the 747 400 avionics package that goes with it. We’ve got a ton of great avionics in the simulator.”
All these enhancements, from addressing install size, entirely new forms of photogrammetry and an unprecedented digital twin of Earth, the enhanced learning system, the vast and innovative Career System, were not the only things that the development team was excited about. They are, as Neumann explains, all the result of carefully listening to the wishes and dreams of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s passionate community. The community feedback was welcomed and embraced by the dev teams and became the guiding principles in the creation of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 “We are making this new simulator for the community, and we are working directly with the community and it is through this fantastic collaboration that MSFS 2024 is able to take flight simulation to the next level,” Neumann shares.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is shaping up to be the most ambitious commercially available flight simulator that has ever been undertaken – and it’s not even close. It’s fun to think about how many decades some of us have been “flying” in front of our PCs now, and it’s impressive to see how Microsoft’s longest-running franchise wasn’t content to just settle for sticking the landing a few years ago – it wants to keep soaring and bring all of us along for the ride. Time to buckle up.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – available for pre-order today on Steam — will launch in a variety of editions on November 19, 2024, and day one with PC Game Pass. All pre-orders will receive the De Havilland Canada CL-415 firefighting aircraft to use instantly in Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020). The Standard Edition comes with 70 aircraft and 150 upgraded airports; Deluxe Edition will include 10 additional aircraft and five extra airports; the Premium Deluxe will have another 15 aircraft (total of 95); and then there’s the Aviator Edition for those who want everything which comes with all of the above plus the 30 planes that have been released in the Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) Marketplace for a grand total of 125 planes with that edition.
Click here to pre-order on Steam!
